If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Well, you seem to be the first person calling me by my real name. Anyway, the list you have provided is once again longer than what I had already in my mind.

Well, among those that you have mentioned, I had not thought of :

Memory Dumps
chkdsk fragments
Cluster Tips.

Well, I understand the two of them but I have no clue of what is a 'cluster tip'? After going through Google (which was not to much helpful), I found that a cluster tip is the unused space in the last cluster for a file. Well, if it is so, what is the Cluster Slack Space then? I mean to ask:

What are the differences between the Cluster Tip and Cluster Slack Space?

Cluster tips are what is left at the end. By "slack space" I was referring to the hidden stuff that gets on an NTFS formatted HDD due to the use of data streams. Probably the wrong term I know, but I am going back to my NT 4.0 days which are somewhat hazy by now

The chkdsk fragments are the "orphaned" bits of files that running chkdsk/scandisk produces. As they are generated as the result of some sort of crash, you never know what sensitive info might be in them?

I just realised that I did not correctly distinguish "free space". This has been marked as "available" but may still contain the previous files' data. Slightly different from the cluster tips that won't get overwritten, as they are not seen as available.

Defragmentation is another issue I forgot to mention. It frequently uses free space on the drive (usually at the end) to reassemble fragmented files before copying them back. Like data streams, you won't be able to see them without forensic tools.

Well, Thanks once again for the info. Defragmentation is opne thing which had helped me recover my data from a partition which I accidently deleted using the compmgmt.msc facility on Windows XP. The recovery software recovered the data from what I think was a part of defragmentation process I had carried out just the previous day I deleted the partition.

Well, as far as free space is concerned, I already had the idea; thanks for the confirmation though!

Now as you say, you are talking about the OLD days of NT 4.0, I think that NTFS is STILL a file system which uses the data streams for storing almost anything on the disk. So what is the 'change' in NTFS since those days (except the special metadata files which went on increasin in number with Windows NT versions)? Kindly clarify.

Another point: I have almost never run chkdsk by my ownself. I have seen it being done on other systems; I see this thing on my system only when Windows XP checks a FAT32 partition after a crash. Well, how exactly does chkdsk produce those (presumably) 'sensitive' data from the files being checked?

Of course, you have to have all the others. Almost all other senior members (when I say senior members, I mean seniority by experience not by post count) must be having them as well. And really, I was thinking of the slack space thing whole day ... almost 8 hours regularly. Since I am about to buy another one, I would do some experiments on this thing on the new one.